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Directors Target of New Cybersecurity Training

Dec. 5 — No company is immune from cybersecurity threats, not even a chocolate maker.

Take it from the nation’s first Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, who now sits
on the board of Hershey Co. He says every company is a digital company, including
the Pa.-based manufacturer of Kisses and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Hershey—which
uses information technology to manage manufacturing, sales and other business processes—regularly updates its
directors on how digital assets and data are being protected.

“I think more and more companies are beginning to believe that they may sell a product,
they may sell a service, they may sell both,” Ridge, who advised the president on
national security from just after the Sept. 11 attacks until 2005, told Bloomberg
BNA. “But it’s all based on a digital infrastructure that is more and more vulnerable
every day.”

To help boards get a better handle on hacking risks, his consulting firm, Ridge Global
LLC, is teaming up with the National Association of Corporate Directors and Carnegie
Mellon University to offer a first-of-its-kind
cybersecurity training program geared at directors. Starting in mid-January, directors will learn about their role
and responsibilities in cybersecurity oversight.

From credit cards at Target Corp. to e-mails at Sony
Pictures Entertainment Inc., board members don’t need to look any further than the
headlines to see their companies are being targeted by hackers, Ridge said.

Thirst for Knowledge

An organization will face more than 100 focused and targeted breach attempts every
year, on average, in addition to the thousands to millions of random attempts that
company networks repel each week. One in three of those targeted attempts will succeed,
according to a recent
study by Accenture Plc.

“The demand is there,” NACD President Peter Gleason told Bloomberg BNA. “When we start
talking about cyber, you can tell that there’s a thirst for knowledge among the director
community.”

Corporate directors
surveyed by BDO Consulting say cybersecurity is taking up more and more of their time. But
for most boards, interest in cybersecurity outweighs understanding. Only 14 percent
of directors surveyed by NACD think they have a high level of cyberliteracy.

Part of the problem is the language barrier between security professionals and board
members. “Both sides of the table need to work on their literacy,” said Ryan LaSalle,
who directs Accenture’s global security practice strategy.

Avoiding Jargon

Communications skills are considered the single-most important attribute for successful
information security professionals, according to a
survey of the workforce by the International Information System Security Certification Consortium.
The consortium specializes in information security education and certifications.

“Speaking to [directors] in plain English and in the language of a board would go
a long way towards bridging the gap,” LaSalle told Bloomberg BNA.

The NACD program will try to avoid technical jargon as it teaches directors about
issues such as cyber insurance and breach notification. The course will also simulate
a cyber crisis and test corporate leadership’s preparedness to respond.

“We don’t expect a director to have the level of expertise that someone in the field
would have,”
Summer Craze Fowler, who teaches in the cybersecurity risk and resilience program
at Carnegie Mellon, told Bloomberg BNA. “But we want them to have a familiarity with
the concepts and to understand, most importantly, what questions they should be asking
of the cybersecurity experts in their company.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Andrea Vittorio in Washington at
avittorio@bna.com

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Yin Wilczek at
ywilczek@bna.com

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